Miss Sarah spoke with a large and grim geniality, for she always had the air of one who says, “Mankind, I am about to chastise you for your weakness, but I realize that I am human as well as you.”
Meantime my poor Ellen had heard in each one of these knocks on the door Roger’s knock, and so she continued to hear the next day. She wrote:—
“He’s gone away, and I have only learned about it by chance. Just by chance I heard Aunt Sarah saying: ‘As if it wasn’t excitement enough to have this happen yesterday, that young scallawag gets up and leaves me at a moment’s notice.’ Two of his friends came through, it seems, and Roger left with them. He left without sending word or sending me any message. He says he’s gone for a day or two only. Aunt Sarah says she would not be surprised if he never came back, but that can’t happen. How could it happen? Did he think that I had failed him so that he doesn’t want me any more, or that I lacked so in courage and in love of him?... Another day has gone and no word from him. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone in all my life and so cut off from all human help. I know it is wicked of me, but mother’s happiness hurts me. I want her to be happy, but oh! it hurts me to watch it. I wish I could go off by myself somewhere, and yet I know that there I will be worse than I am now, with a thousand small things to do to somehow fill up the days. Something must have happened to him. I watch myself like some other person for fear I shall seem sad for a moment, for if I do it will look as though I am not pleased about my mother. Oh! I hope that I won’t hurt their joy in any way. I wonder how women live who have to wait long for news of those they love. I seem to move around in the world, but I really do nothing but wait. Each time I see my aunt I think that she will have news of him; I’m grateful to her now if she only tells me he hasn’t come. When I am asleep, I’m still listening and waiting for him. Something must have happened to him, because he must want to see me as I do him. It seems to me that no one could hurt any one they loved as much as this and be alive.”
Here it was for the first time that Ellen tasted that bitter pain of women, waiting. It sometimes seems to me that this is an anguish in which we live and of which men know nothing. During the course of a long life every woman passes so many hours of still agony when she must fold her hands and smile and wait. We cannot go out seeking the beloved, but must sit and wait until he comes. Like Ellen, when you have had a misunderstanding it is not yours to run generously forward; you can’t clap your hat on your head and say, “Here, I’ll make an end to this; I’ll go and find her.” No, you must sit waiting for the sound of his footsteps coming toward you; wait until your whole soul is tense; wait until each sound is part of this hope deferred. All women know this pain of waiting; and when our time of waiting for a sweetheart is over, the sons we love go out into the world, and again we can do nothing but sit still and wait for news of the travelers, wait for the little, scant messages of love which their careless hands pen to us in some casual moment. The long days pass and the letters don’t come, and still we wait. We sit and wait for our children to be born, through the long months, with the black certainty of the birth that may be death staring us in the face.
Some women get used to waiting. I think that those who do have closed the doors of their hearts to the keener range of feeling, having suffered so much that they say to themselves, “Here, I’ll suffer no longer.” There are yet others who pass through the pain of waiting, going by this thorny, bleeding, silent road of doubt and pain to a higher acquiescence. It is a long way there, and the heart of us must weep much in silence before we can attain this glorified peace. I have known the spirits of women to snap like the overstrained strings of a harp, as they waited with smiles upon their lips.
I am sorry sometimes for all women, and most of all for the impatient, tender, and flaming spirits of young girls who meet this pain for the first time.
It is because we have all suffered in this way that the most generous among us run so eagerly to meet those whom they love. Having tasted this pain, we wish forevermore to spare others anything like it. The more shallow-hearted and, perhaps, wiser women, and those who are not children of light, having tasted it, use the anguish of suspense as a weapon in the everlasting warfare between man and woman. But there is hardly a woman grown who could not echo the cry of Ellen when she wrote:—
“I do not dare to go out of the house for fear I might miss some word of him, and yet how can I stay in the house knowing my own thoughts? I wish to fill the gray horror of these empty hours with anything that the wayside will bring me; I want to go out and play with the children; I want to find Alec and walk with him. I try to remember just one thing—that some time to-day or to-morrow, or the next day, I shall hear something. This can’t go on forever; there has to come an end.”